Morgan Freeman, the actor who became a film star in his fifties and now sets lawyers on AI copies of his voice

Morgan Freeman

Photo: DoD News Features / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 1, 1937 Memphis, Tennessee, USA
Occupation	Actor, narrator and film director
Known for	The Shawshank Redemption, The Dark Knight, Se7en
Awards	Academy Award · Golden Globe · Cecil B. DeMille Award · Kennedy Center Honors · AFI Life Achievement (lifetime achievement) · SAG Award (lifetime achievement) · Obie · Drama Desk

Morgan Freeman’s voice has played God twice, introduced the evening news, explained wormholes and walked a colony of emperor penguins across Antarctica. Audiences trust it so completely that strangers now copy it with software and put the copies to work. The man who owns it finds this less flattering than infuriating. He has said his lawyers are kept busy chasing the clones, and he describes the practice with a word most actors avoid in public: robbery.

The irony is that the cinema took decades to notice that voice at all. Freeman spent his twenties and thirties dancing, touring, acting Off-Broadway and doing children’s television he privately disliked. He was nearly fifty before a film role made critics stop and ask who he was. Everything that followed, the wise men, the presidents, the convict who narrates a prison story, the deity in a white suit, came in the second half of a life that had already been long. He is still working, and he is unusually frank about why.

A Mississippi childhood and an Air Force detour

Freeman was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on June 1, 1937, the youngest of four children of Mamie Edna Revere, a teacher, and Morgan Porterfield Freeman, a barber who died in 1961. As an infant he was sent to live with his paternal grandmother in Charleston, Mississippi, and the family moved often after that, to Greenwood, to Gary in Indiana and to Chicago. He has said he first heard the blues on that grandmother’s porch in the Delta. The sound stayed with him for the rest of his life.

He made his acting debut at nine, in the lead of a school play, and at twelve won a statewide drama competition. He graduated from Broad Street High School in Greenwood in 1955 and was offered a partial drama scholarship by Jackson State University. He turned it down and enlisted in the United States Air Force instead, where he worked as an automatic tracking radar repairman and reached the rank of airman first class. In 1959 he left the service and moved to Los Angeles.

There he took acting classes at the Pasadena Playhouse and studied theater arts at Los Angeles City College, where a teacher pushed him toward dance. For several years he followed that advice. He danced at the 1964 World’s Fair, joined the Opera Ring musical theater group in San Francisco, toured in The Royal Hunt of the Sun and stood as an extra in Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker. Somewhere in that period he decided that acting, not dancing, was the thing he could not give up.

Twenty years on stage before the camera paid attention

Freeman made his Off-Broadway debut in 1967 opposite Viveca Lindfors in a play about the Freedom Riders, and reached Broadway the next year in the all-Black production of Hello, Dolly! that starred Pearl Bailey and Cab Calloway. In 1971 he joined the PBS children’s series The Electric Company, which gave him a steady income and a face that a generation of American children recognized. He left in 1975. The show’s co-creator Joan Ganz Cooney later said he loathed doing it and that it was a very unhappy period of his life; Freeman himself has said he rarely thinks about it, though he is grateful for it.

His first credited film role, in Who Says I Can’t Ride a Rainbow!, came in 1971 and changed nothing. The stage did. In 1978 he played a wino in The Mighty Gents and won a Drama Desk Award and a Clarence Derwent Award. In 1980 he received an Obie for the title role in Coriolanus, and further Obies followed for a preacher in the musical The Gospel at Colonus and for Hoke Colburn, the chauffeur in Alfred Uhry’s play Driving Miss Daisy. On screen he worked steadily but in the margins: a small part in Brubaker, a part in the television film Attica, a role in Peter Yates’s Eyewitness, two years as the architect Roy Bingham on the soap opera Another World.

Street Smart and a very late arrival

The turn came with Street Smart in 1987, in which he played a pimp named Fast Black opposite Christopher Reeve. It was the opposite of the dignified figures he would later be typecast as, and it was frightening. Roger Ebert praised a man who could be charming or intimidating, whatever the scene needed. The performance earned him his first Academy Award nomination, for Best Supporting Actor, and Freeman has called it his breakthrough. He turned fifty that year.

What followed was one of the most crowded two-year stretches any American actor has had. In 1989 alone he played Sergeant Major John Rawlins beside Denzel Washington in Edward Zwick’s Civil War drama Glory, the unyielding school principal Joe Clark in Lean on Me, a New Orleans detective in Walter Hill’s Johnny Handsome, and Hoke again, this time on film, in Bruce Beresford’s Driving Miss Daisy with Jessica Tandy. That last role brought a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy and a Best Actor nomination at the Oscars. The following year he gave voice to Frederick Douglass in Ken Burns’s documentary series The Civil War, an early sign of where his voice would take him.

Red, Somerset and the Eastwood years

In 1992 Clint Eastwood cast him as Ned Logan, the old partner who rides out with William Munny one last time in Unforgiven. The film won four Oscars, including Best Picture, and began a working friendship that would matter more than any other in Freeman’s career. A year later he stepped behind the camera for Bopha!, a drama about a Black police sergeant, played by Danny Glover, whose loyalties are torn apart in apartheid-era South Africa. The Washington Post praised how calmly he handled it. He has not directed another feature since.

Then came the role most people now associate with him. In Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption in 1994 he played Red, the prison fixer who narrates the friendship at the heart of the story. In Stephen King’s novella Red is a white Irishman; Freeman was cast at the suggestion of the producer Liz Glotzer. He has admitted that Darabont’s appetite for take after take wore him down. The film underperformed at the box office, earned him another Best Actor nomination and went on to become one of the most watched dramas of its era on television and home video.

A year later he played the weary detective William Somerset opposite Brad Pitt in David Fincher‘s Se7en. With the producer Lori McCreary, whom he had met on Bopha!, he founded Revelations Entertainment, a company meant to put stories with Black characters and overlooked histories on screen. The late 1990s brought Amistad for Steven Spielberg, the psychologist Alex Cross in Kiss the Girls and its sequel, and the first of his many presidents, Tom Beck in Deep Impact. In 2004 Eastwood cast him again as Eddie Dupris, the one-eyed former boxer who keeps the gym running in Million Dollar Baby. It won Freeman the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, on his fourth acting nomination.

How a voice became an institution

Freeman has explained that the voice was partly built. In speech classes in college he noticed that most people talk too fast or too high, and he trained himself to speak in a lower register and to land every word. By the mid-2000s producers had realized what that sounded like on a soundtrack. In 2005 he narrated both Luc Jacquet’s Oscar-winning documentary March of the Penguins and the opening of Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. He had already played God in Bruce Almighty opposite Jim Carrey, and he would play the role again in Evan Almighty.

The same authority made him the natural choice for Lucius Fox, the engineer who quietly supplies Batman, in Christopher Nolan‘s Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises. And it carried him to the part he had spent years trying to get made. Freeman had wanted to play Nelson Mandela for a long time. When an adaptation of Mandela’s autobiography stalled, he bought the rights to John Carlin’s book about the 1995 Rugby World Cup and took it to Eastwood. Invictus, released in 2009 with Matt Damon as the Springbok captain François Pienaar, brought Freeman his fifth Oscar nomination for acting.

Television built the voice into something closer to a public utility. In 2010 CBS chose him to replace Walter Cronkite as the recorded introduction to its evening newscast. That same year he began hosting Through the Wormhole on the Science Channel, which ran until 2017, and from 2016 he fronted The Story of God with Morgan Freeman for National Geographic, travelling to ask how different faiths answer the same questions. When interviewers ask whether he believes in God, his answers tend to be playful and unorthodox rather than devout.

The jobs he took for the money, and says so

The reverent version of Freeman’s career leaves out how many weak films he has made. Alongside the classics there is Evan Almighty, a costly flop, the poorly reviewed Last Knights, and three films in the Has Fallen action series, in which he rose from Speaker of the House to President as Allan Trumbull. Reviewing London Has Fallen, the critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky noted that it was possible to write dialogue that sounds like garbage even in Freeman’s sonorous voice. In the early 2020s a run of little-seen thrillers such as Vanquish and The Ritual Killer did little for his reputation.

He does not pretend otherwise. In an interview with The New York Times in August 2026 he was asked what he looks for in a screenplay and answered that it depends on the fee: if they pay you enough, he said, you overlook some of the glitches in the script. Coming from an actor whose screen persona rests on moral authority, it is a useful corrective. Freeman has always talked about acting as a trade, and the trade has been good to him.

His public statements have also drawn criticism. In 2005, on CBS’s 60 Minutes, he called Black History Month ridiculous, telling Mike Wallace that he did not want a Black history month because Black history is American history. Plenty of people disagreed. In May 2018 CNN published an investigation in which eight women accused him of behavior that some described as harassment and others as inappropriate. Freeman apologized to anyone who had felt uncomfortable or disrespected and said that had never been his intent. One of the women named in the report later said CNN had taken her remarks out of context. His lawyer demanded a retraction, and the Screen Actors Guild, which had presented him with its Life Achievement Award that January, decided after a review not to take any action against him.

Mississippi, bees and the blues

Freeman never really left the Delta. He lives in Charleston, Mississippi, the town where his grandmother raised him, and keeps a home in New York. In May 2001 he opened the Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale with the lawyer Bill Luckett and Howard Stovall, turning an old building by the railway tracks into a juke joint for local musicians and the tourists who come looking for them. He learned to fly at 65 and has owned several private planes. In 2014, worried by the collapse of honeybee colonies, he turned his 124-acre ranch into a bee sanctuary, starting with 26 hives.

His private life has not been easy. On August 3, 2008, his car rolled over near Ruleville, Mississippi, and he had to be cut out of the wreck. His left shoulder, arm and elbow were broken, and the nerve damage that followed left him with fibromyalgia and a left hand he can barely use. He was married to Jeanette Adair Bradshaw from 1967 to 1979 and to Myrna Colley-Lee from 1984 until their divorce in 2010. He has four children. In August 2015 his step-granddaughter E’dena Hines, whom he and Colley-Lee had helped raise, was killed in New York at the age of 33. In 2021 he and the University of Mississippi professor Linda Keena gave a million dollars to found a center for evidence-based policing and reform at the university.

Honours, and a farewell to a friend

The recognition arrived as steadily as the work. Freeman received the Kennedy Center Honors in 2008, the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award in 2011, the Golden Globes’ Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2012 and the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 2018. A guest turn opposite Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin in The Kominsky Method earned him an Emmy nomination in 2021.

In March 2025, at the 97th Academy Awards, it was Freeman who walked out to introduce the In Memoriam segment with a tribute to Gene Hackman, who had died days earlier. He reminded the audience that he had worked with Hackman on Unforgiven and Under Suspicion, and quoted his friend’s wish to be remembered simply as someone who tried to do good work. It was a short speech, delivered in the voice everyone in the room knew, about a colleague rather than about himself.

Still working at 89

Freeman turned 89 on June 1, 2026, and his calendar remains fuller than that of many actors half his age. Since 2023 he has played Secretary of State Edwin Mullins in Taylor Sheridan’s spy series Lioness on Paramount+, opposite Zoe Saldaña and Nicole Kidman; its third season premiered on August 2, 2026 and ended on September 20. In November 2025 he returned as the magic debunker Thaddeus Bradley in Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, his only film release of that year. Asked then about retiring, he told The Guardian that the idea floats past him until his agent calls with an offer, and that his appetite for work has dimmed a little but not enough to make a serious difference.

The voice keeps working too. After narrating the Netflix nature series Life on Our Planet in 2023, he narrated The Dinosaurs, a four-part Netflix series executive-produced by Steven Spielberg, made by Amblin and Silverback Films with visual effects by Industrial Light and Magic, which premiered on March 6, 2026. In the same interviews in which he discusses those jobs, he complains about AI copies of his voice made without his consent. He has said they make him angry, that he gets paid to do that kind of work, and that anyone who does it without him is robbing him.

His most personal project this year draws on that grandmother’s porch. Morgan Freeman’s Symphonic Blues Experience, released by Decca on August 7, 2026, is a twelve-song journey through a century of the blues that he narrates and produced, recorded with the Chineke! Orchestra at Royal Studios in Memphis and Abbey Road in London, with guests including Taj Mahal, Keb’ Mo’ and Shemekia Copeland. Through Revelations he and McCreary are also backing new filmmakers: in 2026 they joined a project by the Nigerian director C.J. Obasi, who made Mami Wata, from Flix Oven’s new African-Korean residency.

One film has been waiting in the wings for years. Sniff, a noir set in a luxury retirement community, directed by Taylor Hackford, with Freeman as the detective Joe Mulwray alongside Al Pacino, Helen Mirren and Danny DeVito, was announced in 2021 and still has no release date. Freeman turns 90 on June 1, 2027. On current evidence he will spend the run-up the way he has spent most of the past four decades: taking the calls, reading the offers, asking what they are going to pay and, more often than not, saying yes.